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not strong enough among laborers, it certainly is among the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie, in whom the class instinct is much more active than in laborers. And this is true even in countries with democratic laws and institutions. I refer to the separation between bourgeois democrats and socialists in Switzerland, Bernstein's Eldorado, where, according to Bernstein's doctrine, class antagonism should properly have entirely disappeared; but we know it exists there just as strong as in less democratic countries . But it is not denied that the acuteness of class struggles is lessened by democratic institutions.
In Belgium with its free institutions on one hand and its priest-ridden government on the other hand, election alliances between the Social Democracy and the bourgeois parties have heretofore found a fertile soil. At any rate, in all alliances which it formed there our party had the advantage of being in the lead. It could not be exploited nor deceived. And yet the Belgium comrades have found a drawback in compromises. Comrade van der Velde, writing in the Wiener Arbeiterzeitung, welcomes the introduction of the proportional system in Belgium as the end of election alliances. "In future," he writes, "secondary factors will no longer enter into the class struggle; the confusing side issues will disappear which render it so difficult for the masses to grasp the truth of the class struggle." Friend van der Velde has therefore found out that compromises, even there where they take place under conditions and circumstances the most favorable for the laborers, have an injurious effect because "they render it difficult for the masses to grasp the truth of the class struggle;" in other words, alliances by removing the laborers from the ground of the class struggle take away from them the possibility of developing their full power and making it count. This they
